A Second Chance for Veterans: Baltimore City's Veterans Treatment Court

Baltimore City is home to more than 30,000 veterans. It is also home to the Veterans Treatment Court - a special docket of Maryland’s District Court - which aims to rehabilitate, rather than incarcerate, former military members. We speak to two social workers from the VA-Maryland Health Care System, who work with veterans facing criminal charges, as well as with a Vietnam vet who graduated in January from the docket.

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A week from tomorrow the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center opens to the public in Dorchester County, on a 17-acre park on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The center illustrates Tubman’s life and her work as a liberator. We speak to Chris Elcock, a senior associate at the Baltimore firm GWWO, Inc. Architects. He tells us how the center's design references Tubman's courage and the history of slavery in Maryland. Plus, historian Tony Cohen, founder of The Menare Foundation, describes what escape on the Underground Railroad was like.

Cancer treatments like surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation can be harrowing, and the cancer often returns. But a new treatment has come into use: it harnesses the body’s own immune system to destroy cancer. So far, immunotherapy doesn’t work in most patients. But when it does, the results can seem miraculous. Cancer survivor Stephanie Joho had run out of treatment options when she discovered immunotherapy. She recalls a moment soon after she started treatment: “I sat at the dinner table and I remember crying. Because I looked at my parents and I said, ‘I’m hungry.’ I didn’t remember what that felt like. I hadn’t felt hunger in probably over a year.” She and Dr. Drew Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins, join us.

Today we continue our coverage of the $130 million dollar budget gap facing Baltimore City Schools. How does state funding for the schools work? Are the formulas that guide that funding adequate? Bebe Verdery, director of the ACLU of Maryland’s Education Reform Project, says that while factors like rising costs and falling enrollment are partly to blame for the massive budget shortfall, the real culprit is the funding formula itself.